


Much madness is divinest sense

by Naraht



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Mental Illness, Season/Series 03, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-04-08
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2017-10-08 19:04:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/78598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of season three, Mulder and Scully are diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to a mental hospital. Can Mulder convince Scully that this is another plot by the conspiracy? Or have they both descended into insanity?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by the events of "Grotesque" and "Wetwired." It seemed to me in watching season three that both Mulder and Scully were cracking up, and that no one was calling them on it. I mean, drugs in the drinking water leading to a fistfight in the FBI hallways? The whole gargoyle thing? Scully shooting at Mulder after being prompted by subliminal television messages? Am I the only one who's thinking schizophrenia here?
> 
> Originally I was going to title the story "Folie A Deux." It annoyed me to discover that the show's writers had gotten to the title before I did. 
> 
> Thanks to my parents for expert advice, and especially to my father for an inside look at the mental health system. Shanith beta-read this on Christmas Eve, which was above and beyond the call of duty. Dr_biscuit gave me some medical advice too, but I think I ignored most of it. Needless to say, all errors remaining are purely my own and are probably there for dramatic effect.

> "Much madness is divinest sense  
> To a discerning eye;  
> Much sense the starkest madness.
> 
> It is the majority  
>  In this, as all, prevails.  
>  Assent, and you are sane;  
>  Demur, you're straightaway dangerous,  
>  And handled with a chain."  
>  – Emily Dickinson

"You've got to help me, Scully," he says, reaching towards me across the dull metal table. He says the same thing every time. His hand is shaking, a side effect of the medications that they've dosed him with. "You're the only one who knows. You know what they did. If you can get to the Lone Gunmen..."

I understand what happened as soon as I see him in the visiting room at the mental hospital, as soon as I see the bandages at the back of his neck. He tried, by himself in a dirty bathroom, without anesthesia or sterile instruments, to cut out the alien implant that he was sure lay just beneath the skin at the base of his skull. Somehow he got hold of a razor blade, found it in the bedding of the shrubs during one of his walks on the grounds. The psychiatrists tell me that it was a suicide attempt, but I know better. Mulder would have known better. He's just lucky that the angle meant he wasn't able to cut very deeply. There's nothing there, of course, nothing but stitches and the beginnings of a network of scar tissue.

"The people here are helping you," I say patiently. I reach out, gently curling his outstretched hand closed and guiding it down towards the tabletop. "More than I can. Mulder, you've got to let them. They helped me."

"No, don't you see?" His hand hardens into a fist and he jerks it away from my touch. "That's what they *want* you to believe, Scully. They've brainwashed you, made you think exactly what they want you to think. And now they want to do it to me."

He jumps to his feet, the chair clattering loudly against the floor, and begins to pace. Through the frosted glass pane of the door, I can see the orderly pausing outside. They still consider him a danger to himself and to others. I've heard the litany of reports: escape attempts, attacks on staff and other patients, incidents of self-harm. Mulder is not supposed to get agitated, but his mind runs to only one thing when he is with me. I'm not allowed to stay very long.

When I speak, it's in my most calming and most reasonable tones. "Mulder, don't be afraid. It's going to be all right. They'll take care of you."

"You bet they will," he says fiercely, still pacing, unable to stand still now that he's been catalyzed into motion. "I won't let them."

"I have to go now," I say, rising from my seat. "I'll be back next week. Same as always."

"Do you know what they do to me when you're not here?" he shouts after me as I leave. "Do they tell you that? Did you realize that they still practice electroshock therapy?"

This is, of course, a part of his disordered thinking. They have never treated Mulder with electroconvulsive therapy. It can't be delivered without consent unless under extreme circumstances, and even then it has to be approved by a judicial order. There isn't even a machine at the hospital.

But I can hear him shouting even through the closed door. "Scully! Scully, don't leave me here!"

***

It all began when I pulled a gun on my partner. If there is a sin more heinous, more mortal, in the FBI's long catalog, then I don't know what it is. In my mother's home in Baltimore, I leveled a gun at Fox Mulder, unrolling a string of wild and baseless accusations that included his complicity in the government conspiracy that we had spent the past three years attempting to combat. With my mother listening wide-eyed by my side, and almost unable to hold my gun steady, I accused him of having killed my sister Melissa, of having conspired against me from the start, of having come to the house in order to kill me. If it hadn't been for my mother's intervention, I would have shot him dead and considered it a narrow escape.

We concluded that the cause of my paranoia was a mind-control experiment secretly being conducted by a government agency. Transmitter devices had been planted in telephone exchanges across the greater D.C. area, sending coded messages to television sets, and via them into the minds of their viewers. At the time this seemed to be a perfectly reasonable conclusion, even supported by the evidence. Needless to say, it was actually a sign of the psychosis into which we both were falling.

If I had gotten help then, it would have been better for both of us. Instead, they covered up for me, Mulder and my mother. I still don't know whether she believed the stories he spun, or whether she just wanted to save me from institutionalization. Whatever the reason, I ended up with no treatment other than a week of bed rest, and with an ambiguous diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder in my file. The doctors said that they could find nothing physically wrong with me. No one told them about the gun.

Even so, there was still the issue of the four shots that I had fired at Mulder while fleeing my motel room. And the resulting manhunt, with an APB put out for an armed and dangerous FBI agent on the run. Everything ended well, or at least as well as could be expected, and no criminal charges were brought against me. Still, it wasn't the sort of thing that could be swept under the carpet. Skinner hadn't forgotten Mulder's statement that I was suffering from some form of paranoid psychosis. Other, more shadowy figures within the government quickly realized what a convenient explanation this could provide for the events of the past few months. As a result, as soon as I recovered from the immediate effects of my ordeal, I found myself before an FBI disciplinary board which had the power to bring my career to a premature end.

Mulder went to the wall for me. He really did. Unfortunately, under the circumstances it would have been much better for both of us if he'd stayed silent. The disciplinary board heard about the government conspiracy, they heard about the shadowy figures who were trying to discredit us, and they heard that I might still be suffering the aftereffects of the paranoia brought on by a secret government mind-control experiment. None of them could have forgotten that they were hearing this from the man who, a few months earlier, had punched Assistant Director Skinner in a public hallway at the FBI and claimed afterwards that he was under the influence of a mysterious psychotropic drug which had been administered by figures unknown via his drinking water. This didn't look like the usual eccentricity of "Spooky" Mulder and his increasingly gullible partner. This looked like insanity, pure and simple.

We were both suspended without pay, indefinitely, told to go downstairs to clean out our desks and then to report for a full psychiatric evaluation. It was the last time that we saw our office. We sat there in the obscure half-illumination of a cloudy day filtering down through the light wells. We sat there and looked at each other, and did nothing whatsoever to clean out our desks. I didn't even have one. As for Mulder, if he'd had to clean out all the crap that he'd "temporarily" stashed in the disused utility room next door, it would have taken a couple of days and a U-Haul.

"They're going to get us out of the way permanently," he said, perching on the edge of his desk. "They're going to send us to the funny farm, Scully."

"They're going to--?" I stopped and stared at him. "Now Mulder, that *is* crazy."

"We know too much. The digital tape, the black oil, the hybrid experiments, the mind-control machine. We know that the FBI is compromised. And they know that we know." He ran a hand through his already disheveled hair. "What better way to discredit us for good, to punish us, to put us in a position where we can't do anything to stop them? They've been waiting for this chance for a long time. Think about it."

"Psychiatric treatment doesn't work that way anymore, Mulder. They don't just lock the door and throw away the key. And besides..."

"You tell the psychiatrist what we just told the board. Do you think she'll believe you? For years you didn't even believe *me*."

"And besides," I continued firmly, "even if we are removed permanently, we can still pursue our investigations through other channels..."

At the thought of being forced to leave the FBI, where I'd spent my entire adult life, my spirit quailed. But I was determined to put on a brave face for Mulder.

"You don't think that they're going to just let us walk free, do you, Scully? Are you really that naive?" His voice was bitter, haunted. "Haven't you noticed that we're both being followed? Don't you know that they're tapping your phone, searching your house when you're out, talking to your relatives? Haven't you noticed? You're not the only one in danger."

In that moment, it all crystallized for me. The odd static on the line that I'd put down to the effects of telecom deregulation; the distracted voice of my mother on the phone; the way that nothing at home ever seemed to be where I'd left it. As much as I hated to admit it, he was right. It all fit together.

"What do you suggest we do?"

"We have to get out of the country, now. Go somewhere they can't trace us."

"South America?"

"I was thinking England."

I shrugged and made no comment. Mulder grabbed his desk chair and rolled it over to one of the skylights. "They'll be watching the exits. We have to get out by the back way."

"I didn't know there *was* a back way."

"I've been preparing for this day, Scully."

Mulder got up onto the chair and started trying to lever the skylight open with a pen knife. I began to throw things into my shoulder bag--Mulder's packet of sunflower seeds; my bag of muesli; the fake passports that we got when helping out with an INS sting, the ones that Mulder somehow "forgot" to hand in. The two thousand dollars in used bills that he keeps for cases where he doesn't want to be traced.

The door swung open. No warning, no chance to take cover, and for a moment I didn't recognize the dark figure backlit by the hall lights. I would have gone for my gun, but they'd already taken it away. Not that we could have hoped to shoot our way out.

Skinner stepped into the office and looked around in confusion. "What the hell is going on here?"

"I could ask you the same question," said Mulder, only reluctantly turning away from the window. "Assistant Director," he added, his voice thick with disdain.

"I'm here to make sure that you get to your psychiatric evaluation. And it looks like I didn't arrive a moment too soon."

I dropped the fake passports into my bag and went quietly. I can't say the same for Mulder.

***

Our diagnosis is the same. DSM 295.30, _Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type_. The secondary diagnosis is DSM 297.3, _Shared psychotic disorder_, formerly known as _Folie a deux_. Even in insanity, we're still partners.

I spend most of my time at home now--my mother's home, that is. I lost my own home, along with my job, my medical license, my best friend, the respect of my colleagues, and a few other things along the way. Still, it could be much worse. I spent only three days in the mental hospital after my psychiatric evaluation, having been assessed as cooperative and responsive to drug treatment. Mulder, on the other hand, is still institutionalized and it's likely that he'll remain so for some time. That's quite a feat in these days of HMOs and out-patient treatment.

I'm lucky that they allow me to see him at all. The line between sanity and madness is a tenuous one, easily blurred, and despite the complex pharmacopeia that keeps me anchored to reality, I still find myself too readily drawn back into his patterns of thinking. Sometimes, when I make the trip home from the hospital, the paranoia starts to return and I think I see things, a shadow in the parking garage where I get on the shuttle bus or an extra pair of headlights on the highway. I wonder why the orderly happened to stop outside the room just at that moment in the conversation, why the bus driver looks at me so strangely, and where I have seen them both before. I lean my forehead against the cold glass of the bus window, hoping to calm my racing thoughts, but it never works. _They're following you_, warns Mulder.

At West Falls Church I transfer to the Metro. I take a seat, pull my trenchcoat closer around me, and close my eyes against the fluorescent glare of the lighting, listening intently to the rhythm of the tracks passing under the wheels of the train. I wonder whether I could decipher it if I tried, if it was the only way for my allies to contact me. For allies in this world I must have, beyond one gaunt man in a Virginia mental hospital whose sanity hangs by a thread.

When I get to Union Station it is well after dark. I wait on the platform, watching my breath in the frosty air, pacing back and forth to keep warm. That's what I tell myself, anyway. In fact I'm too agitated to stand still. I start at every shadow, every bystander in the slowly emptying station seeming to be a potential enemy.

"Calm down, Dana," I say to myself under my breath. "It's all right. You're fine, everything's fine, just get ahold of yourself."

But Mulder feels differently. _Watch out, Scully,_ says the voice in my head. _Watchoutwatchoutwatchout_.

By the time the train arrives, I am wound so tightly that my nerves are strung to snapping point. The roar of the diesel engines drowns out my panicked thoughts, but sometimes even that isn't enough, until I am willing to do almost anything to calm the voices in my head. Maybe even something that I might regret.

I arrive back in Baltimore late at night, almost dead on my feet, mind clouded by fatigue even more than by any mental instability. Yet as soon as I turn my key in the lock and step inside, normality returns to me with a strength that is almost palpable. Around me are the ordinary things of domestic life, the overstuffed sofa, the cup of tea on the coffee table, the sound of the television in the background. I know now that there are no hidden messages, and there is nothing speaking to me. Mom is always waiting for me when I get back. She gets to her feet as soon I come into the room, putting down her tea.

"Dana," she says. "How is he? How was the trip?"

"The same," I say. "The psychiatrists are thinking of trying a new regimen, but they can't predict how he'll react. His psychosis is very deep-seated..."

"Dinner is in the oven," she interrupts, more concerned with my own well being than that of my partner. "It'll be ready in twenty minutes. And I've put out your--"

"Yes, mom," I say, and instantly regret my sharpness, the dismissive way that I turn away as she gestures towards the dining room table. Short-term memory loss *is* one of the side effects, and having forgotten my evening round of pills once or twice, I'm in no hurry to repeat the experience. Sitting down at the table, I pour myself a glass of water from the pitcher and carefully line up the brightly colored capsules on my napkin. The best that medical science can offer.

_Don't do it,_ says Mulder's voice faintly in my head. I drown it with a sip of water, and a hard swallow. And another. And another.

***

I see a psychiatrist twice a week. It was one of the conditions of my release from the ward, but it only gets more difficult as time goes by, not easier. It's difficult to let down my guard, to reveal myself to be anything other than the faultlessly rational person that I imagine myself to be. But I know that I have to do this if I want to get well.

"Have you suffered from paranoia or hallucinations in the past three days?" he asks, steepling his fingers.

"Yesterday," I say sheepishly. It seems so ridiculous in the cold and clinical light of day. "I went to visit Mulder. And while I was there, I... wondered whether the orderly might be employed by an organization other than the hospital."

He writes down something in pencil on my chart. Briefly, I wonder who reads it, who he reports to, but that isn't my business and I don't say anything about it to him.

"And I did wonder," I continue, "on the way home, I did wonder whether anyone was following me..."

Another mark on my chart. This one, viewed from upside down, seems more malevolent somehow. It could mean something bad for Mulder. I might have said too much.

I quickly backtrack. "But that's not so odd, really. I mean, I was trained to ask myself that. I've been doing it for the past eight years. And I didn't actually see anyone."

"Good," he says. He always says "good" at this stage, in such a way as to leave it unclear whether he approves of my delusions, the fact that I'm reporting them to him, or the fact that my pursuers have managed to stay out of sight. He taps his pencil on the chart. "Any problems with the meds?"

"No," I say, failing to mention the weight gain and the extreme fatigue, merely the inevitable byproducts of the massive doses of anti-psychotics that they've poured into me. There is a pause. "Is there anything else?"

He sighs. "I think it would be best for the time being if you discontinued your visits to Mr. Mulder."

"Why?"

"On the whole, Dana, you're responding well to treatment. You've been cooperative, and you're starting to respond to the medication. You're learning to guide your thoughts along different lines. But whenever you see Mr. Mulder, you find yourself relapsing into the old patterns."

"But," I begin, helplessly, "but he doesn't have anyone else to visit him. His father is dead; his sister is gone; his mother is elderly and lives up on Martha's Vineyard. I'm all he's got."

"Dana," says my psychiatrist, putting on his most fatherly, caring tone, "Fox Mulder isn't my patient. You are. And I have to tell you that your contact with him is jeopardizing your recovery."

***

> "This is the Hour of Lead -  
> Remembered, if outlived,  
> As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow-  
> First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go -"  
> \--Emily Dickinson

On the morning that I should be preparing to make the trip to Falls Church, I can't even bring myself to get out of bed. I lie there, watching the sun trace its way across the ceiling and listening to my voice echoing emptily in my head. I'm fine, I'm fine.

If I were going to see him, I would have left by now. The long round trip from Baltimore takes most of the day by public transport, three hours each way. I would have left, and I would be on the train to D.C., reading a magazine and looking to the casual observer just like the professional woman that I once was. My visit to Mulder is the one event of my week, the one task that keeps me going. Without it I have no particular reason to get out of bed.

He will await me steadfastly, believing none of the glib assurances that are given to him by the staff, accepting no apology that is offered by another voice or by another hand. The hours will stretch past him, transmuted into minutes by the alchemical power of his belief in me. Yet even Mulder's faith will fail eventually. He will pace, and as he paces he will wonder, small doubts forming a tracery in his mind that eventually becomes solid, blocking out the light. Have I returned to work, reopened the X-Files and continued my work without him? Have I been admitted to another hospital, confined somewhere beyond his reach? Have I gone underground, escaping and abandoning him to a ceaseless regimen that is, in his mind, just short of legalized torture? Am I dead? Or have I simply forgotten him?

Either way, he will realize the truth--that I have finally abandoned him, as he always knew I would. I can hear him as clearly as if he is here in the room with me. _You were the only one I ever trusted, Scully. And now you've betrayed me. How can you live with yourself? _

I am not well, I know I am not well. My eyes prickle with hot, shamed tears and I press my face against my crumpled pillow. I can't face the pretense any longer, can't keep telling my mother--telling myself--that I'm fine. I can't keep living the lie that one day I will be normal again, that one day everything will turn out all right. It will not, not for Mulder and not for me.

I have lost his trust. He has lost my loyalty. Our project has failed. What else is there for either of us? I'm no use to anyone anymore, a burden even to my own mother. I even failed my dog.

Calmly, I get out of bed and walk into the hall, the carpet soft under my bare feet. My mother is downstairs, making lunch and singing to herself as she does. The soft sound of her voice filters up the stairs, echoed by the birdsong outside. For a moment I pause on the landing and listen, leaning against the top of the banister. Then I turn and go into the bathroom, locking the door behind me.

I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I open the medicine cabinet. My face is puffy, the skin around my eyes dusky and shadowed. My lips are chapped and colorless, and even the unruly halo of my hair seems dulled. Despite my twelve hours of sleep last night, I look exhausted, both soul and body utterly spent, the discarded shell that a living, breathing woman once called home.

The razor blades are on the second shelf, half hidden behind a package of cotton wool. I put them to one side. The bottle of aspirin is nearly full. I find myself fumbling hopelessly with the childproof cap, the lid uselessly turning as it slides past the catch again and again. In the silence of the bathroom, the rattling of the pills inside sounds loud. Finally, I put the bottle on the countertop so that I can press down with my whole weight; the raised letters on the plastic cap bite almost painfully into my hand, leaving themselves embossed in reverse into the soft flesh of my palm.

Into that palm I shake the tablets, and swallow them down with a steady, dull efficiency born of the weeks that I have spent compliantly taking my medication morning and night. While the aspirin may not be necessary, I am determined to leave nothing to chance. I will do a better job of it than Mulder did, clutching hold of my dignity in the small things that are left to me. They didn't think to put me on suicide watch.

The bathtub is filling now, steam spiralling upwards and clouding the mirror. Out of habit, I tip a capful of bubble bath into the slowly rising water before slipping out of my nightgown and climbing in. The water is hot against my skin, but I can hardly feel it.

As I reach for the razor blade, lying on the side of the bathtub by the soap, my hand is trembling. Tardive diskinesia from the anti-psychotics, or so I tell myself. I steady my right hand with my left, grasping the blade as carefully as I once held my gun. But my mind wanders--all I can think of is the whiteness of the bathmat, new last year, and the bloody aftermath of all the suicides that I saw while training as a pathologist.

I hear my mother's steps on the stairs. "Dana? Dana, are you all right up there?"

_You have to do it quickly,_ says Mulder's voice. _She'll try to stop you._

So I slide down in the bath until the water is up to my chin, high enough to stop the blood from spraying. And I position the blade against the carotid artery, and make the incision. It's like the first stage in an autopsy, only the body is still alive, and it's my own.

***

"You kicked in the door," I say weakly, accusingly. The green of a hospital curtain hangs in the corner of my vision.

"I didn't have an FBI agent for a daughter without learning a thing or two," replies my mother, her voice steady but edged with tears.

"How did you know?"

"I just knew," she says firmly.

I try to lift my head off the pillow, but even an inch makes me feel dizzy, still weak from blood loss despite all the transfusions. I can feel the sharp pull of the stitches across my throat, and my esophagus feels raw. They must have pumped my stomach.

"I'm going back to the state hospital, aren't I?"

"It's for the best, Dana," she says, and squeezes my hand.

***


	2. Chapter 2

It's been nine days since he's seen her. It feels like an epoch--his life, stretching out before him into the foreseeable future in a monotonous round of going to group therapy sessions and not taking his medication, is divided into the periods Before, During and After Scully. In the time that he's begun to think of as After Scully, he's had no word, no visitors, heard nothing. The television and the newspapers assure him of the continued existence of Washington DC; the Washington Post tells him that Congress is still in session and the confirmation hearings for a new FBI director are expected shortly. But for once he doesn't care. Even the scores of the last Red Sox game don't move him. As far as he is concerned the universe ends with the belt of trees at the bottom of the hospital grounds, and Scully is nowhere within its borders. From the round earth's imagined corners, the trumpets are silent.

In his calmer moments, he sits at the window of his room and watches the sway of the treetops, watches the leaves fade from gold to russet as the fall closes in around them. He wonders where Scully is, and whether she's safe, and whether she's going to make her way back to him. Get out, Scully, he thinks, concentrating hard on the haze over the treeline where Washington lies. Save yourself. Don't look back. But somehow he doubts she will listen, and deep down he hopes she won't.

A few days ago--he can't remember how long ago now--he traded one of his favorite ties for an April 1991 issue of Playboy that has obviously been passed around the unit since time immemorial. Well-thumbed, it offers him nothing new. In fact he read it very thoroughly on a stakeout in the month it was published and he almost gets more joy from remembering that stakeout than he does from the trite pleasures of the centerfold. It was just him and Bill Patterson then, back in the days when he was still working violent crimes. Hours of boredom, endless cups of coffee, ghoulish jokes on subjects that no man should be able to joke about, and a baseball game playing quietly on the car radio, wearing down the battery.

That was very much Before Scully. He's had to give it all up apart from the coffee, burn the baseball, dirty jokes and the pornography on one great pyre of masculine joys. His stakeouts now are more serene, more reflective, just him and Scully sitting side by side and gazing through the window at the street outside. She's not talkative in the way that some male agents can be, talking bull for hours on end just to hear the sound of their own voices. When she has nothing to say, she stays silent and leaves him to his own thoughts. Sometimes she wants to listen to NPR. Sometimes he comes up with ridiculous, outrageous theories just so that he can hear her laugh. Sometimes he watches her sleep, her head dropping closer and closer to his shoulder until she wakes with a mumbled apology or a rare, soft smile. He wonders whether he'll ever go on a stakeout again.

The sound of a car engine outside prompts Mulder to look up from his magazine. A small hatchback is just pulling away from the parking circle below his window, obviously having dropped someone off. Mulder gets to his feet to look out of the window. For one tantalizing moment he sees a flash of red hair just at the corner of his line of sight. He cranes his neck, even considers standing on the chair, but there is nothing more to see. His phantom is gone.

For the rest of the day he is in a state of high tension, a watch spring wound and unable to release. He restlessly paces the halls of the unit, his Playboy folded and tucked inside his suit jacket like a talisman. Standing at the door of the unit, he peers out through the glass, waiting for a woman who never comes. He berates the nurses for being able to offer him no news, for having no visitor to admit or message to pass on. Scully told him that her mother sometimes drove her to the hospital, but he can't think that she would take this long to get upstairs even if she had to settle her mother in the cafeteria first. He counts down the minutes until the end of visiting hours, wondering whether she has business elsewhere in the building, if she is at this very moment looking for an explanation for his captivity or engaged in negotiating the conditions of his release. Never does he consider the possibility that she has become a patient just like himself.

Finally the visiting hours come to an end. Exhaustion claims him, and he goes back to his room aching in every muscle with tension suppressed and now taking its toll. He slides his magazine under the mattress for safekeeping and climbs wearily into bed, pulling the covers close up under his chin. And the thought of Scully, which has tormented him all day, brings him some release.

***

At 11.45 on the next morning, he happens to be sitting in the unit's dining room eating a piece of sweet potato pie and drinking a wholly unsatisfactory cup of lukewarm coffee. No one has joined him at the table--somehow his reputation as "Spooky" Mulder has made the shift to this new environment so quickly that there has almost been no gap. Really he prefers eavesdropping to talking anyway. His table is close to the staff desk, close enough that he can overhear most of the conversations between the nurses.

"Anything much going on?"

"Just the usual. Oh yeah--the other FBI agent got readmitted last night. The little redhead."

Mulder drops his fork.

The first nurse shows only mild interest in this revelation. "Did she really?"

He strains to hear more, but the rest of the conversation is drowned by the clank of trays and the buzz of voices in his ears. Most of the voices are even the ones in the dining room. _Scully is alive,_ say the others in chorus. _Scully is here._ Just the thought that her heart beats in the same building makes his own heart beat more strongly, the blood coursing to his face in one hot rush, tingling in every extremity. _Scully is here._

***

"Anything I can get for you?"

"My cell phone?" As much as he misses his usual reading material, Mulder is not about to ask his boss for the latest issue of _Celebrity Skin_, or even of _The Lone Gunman_.

"Other than that."

Skinner shifts awkwardly on the sagging couch in the visiting room, looking as always just a little too large for the space that he takes up. He is dressed in shirt and tie even on a Saturday, the hospital visitor pass clipped on over his FBI pass. The holster at his belt is conspicuously empty, and Mulder can tell that he feels it.

Mulder shakes his head, leaning forward in the straight-backed chair. His hands are clasped in front of him, his elbows resting on his knees, and he feels just as awkward as Skinner looks. If his visitor were Scully, he would be sitting on the couch next to her.

"I do appreciate your coming to see me, sir," he adds.

Skinner nods, one crisp motion. There is another silence. Then he says it: "You do know that Agent Scully was readmitted last night?"

"I'd heard," Mulder replies noncommittally, leaving the source of his information vague. A nurse overheard at a staff desk may not count as an informant, but he can't be too careful.

"I'm not at liberty to discuss her condition with you, but I do want you to know that she's in good hands, and that she's all right."

"Thank you sir," says Mulder, figuring that he'd better sound grateful. "Do you think," he ventures, "do you think you could tell her, from me..."

"I've already seen her," Skinner says peremptorily. "She's with her mother now."

Mulder looks at the Assistant Director carefully, as if some aura of Scully might still cling to him. Yet Skinner is the same as ever, hard and uncompromising, softened not at all by his brush with her.

"Did she say anything, sir? About me?"

"She has more than enough to think about at the moment, Agent Mulder."

The statement is flat and uninformative even by Skinner's standards. Now he knows Skinner is lying. What he doesn't know is why. While the man collects his coat and scarf, preparing to make his exit, Mulder makes one more attempt. Tearing a scrap of paper from the corner of a magazine, he scribbles a concise plea--"Which unit?"--and palms it to Skinner in a wholly unexpected handshake.

Skinner gives the note only the barest of glances and takes his leave of Mulder with a terse, masculine grunt. He drops the screwed-up piece of paper in the wastebasket on the way out the door.

Mulder sinks into the couch, still warm where Skinner was sitting, and buries his face in his hands.

***

Despite his generally uncooperative attitude, Mulder is eventually granted an unsupervised pass, not quite crazy enough to remain confined to his unit. Whenever he gets the chance he visits the chapel, or at least looks in on the way to the basketball court, knowing that eventually she will find her way there. After a long week of looking he is on the verge of giving up, assuming that she's been released or transferred or moved to a section of the hospital that's inaccessible to ordinary mortals like him. One day, though, he looks through the door and finds one red head bent in prayer.

"Bless me, sister," he says, leaning against the door frame, "for I have sinned. Or maybe I'm about to."

He expects her to start at the sound of his voice, but she doesn't. For a moment she sits motionless. Then, with infinite care, she turns in the pew to look at him--slowly, as if she's something fragile or as if he's a mirage that could disappear under her direct gaze. Drugged, is his first terrified thought. Drugged out of her mind. There's something missing in her eyes, something essentially Scully, and without it she seems dead.

Then she says his name. Her voice is flat and quiet, offering nothing more than a bare acknowledgment. "Mulder."

_What happened, Scully? Scully, what did they do to you? Scully, do you know who you are?_ The questions race through his mind but he keeps his silence, holding himself rigidly still and waiting for her to make the first move. Finally, almost reluctantly, she gets to her feet.

As she comes up to him, he notices that she is still wearing her gold cross. It lies awkwardly over a black turtleneck sweater, dangling from a delicate chain too short to allow it to rest against her chest. At the edge of the sweater's collar, almost obscured from view, an angry line of stitches neatly bisects the pale skin of her neck.

***

"My God, Scully," he says, reaching out gently--so gently--to touch his hand to my skin. "What did they do to you?"

Under the warmth of his fingertips and the soft pain of his touch I can feel my own heartbeat. One, two, three, and then I can stand it no longer and take a half-step back. "I did it to myself, Mulder."

He blinks, once. He looks past me, down at the floor, and then away altogether, unable to face my gaze. I wonder what he is envisioning--the blank, set look on my face as I hold the blade to my throat--whether he is seeing what actually happened, or something even, unimaginably, worse. All this time, and we're still apart.

"Mulder," I begin, hardly knowing where to start. Now he fixes me with his gaze. The look in his eyes, all pain and muzzy disbelief, is almost more than I can bear.

"I'm sorry," I say, simply. _I failed him,_ I think. _Failed him by living, and failed him again by wanting to die._

"But you're alive," says Mulder fiercely, pulling me into a hard embrace. I let him hold me, laying my head against his chest, dimly aware that he's stroking my hair. I can feel tears stinging my eyes, but I don't want to acknowledge the fact, not even now. "You're alive," he repeats, as if this is all in the world that he cares about. Needless to say, this isn't true. Just as I begin to relax into his embrace, he pulls away again, holding me at arm's length and examining me intently.

"You know what this means, don't you?" I know the tone of voice at least. Once it would have meant crop circles or exsanguinated cows or demon actuaries. Now, in these days, I'm not so sure. "We may be inside," he continues, "but at least now we're together. Together, Scully, we can fight this."

Hands firmly on my shoulders, he shakes me once, very gently, by way of emphasis. Right now I don't feel capable of fighting anything, much less Mulder. I feel weak, drained and chilled, living only because I can warm my hands at the embers of his fire.

"But," I say, "Mulder. But, Mulder, I..."

Another gentle shake which meets no resistance from me. "Scully, we're not insane."

"I don't know anymore," I say wearily, allowing him to steady me within the compass of his hands.

"Don't you?" He is still studying me, looking at me like I'm someone he can't quite recognize.

"Mulder, last Tuesday I tried to kill myself. I sat down in my mother's bathtub and I used a straight razor to cut my throat. The only reason I'm here is because the paramedics got to my mother's house within ten minutes, and pumped three pints of whole blood into me on the way to the hospital. I came within a knife's edge of bleeding to death. They saved my life, and I still don't know whether I'm glad or sorry." My voice is hoarse but I feel eerily calm. Somehow I am holding together and I don't know why. "If that isn't insanity," I finish, "I don't know what is."

"Oh, Scully," he says, stricken, "Scully, Scully."

And that is what finally sets me off. He pulls me back into his arms just as I begin to cry in earnest. As I weep into the rumpled cotton of his shirt, I'm clearly, perfectly aware of the absurdity of the situation. Once an independent woman and allegedly competent FBI agent, more recently mental patient and failed suicide, I have just broken down completely in front of my partner, the only man in the world who is even crazier than I am.

I should be more in control than this. I should take hold of myself, but chagrin and fruitless self-reproach just makes me cry harder. I'm so embarrassed.

All the while Mulder holds me patiently, rocking slightly from heel to toe and murmuring comforting words against the crown of my head. His tone is comforting at least, a low continuous even mumble that I can feel almost more than hear as I stand with my eyes squeezed shut and my cheek pressed close against his chest. The bass vibrations of his voice are soothing, transmitted directly to the small bones of my ear. The words themselves are aimed less at me, a gentle, inexorable torrent of thought in which my name serves only as occasional counterpoint to the melody. Its burden is simple: Mulder is not insane.

"What else could it be? What else could it be, Scully? There are so many ways they could be controlling us. The television, the food, the water, the medicine. The medicine is most likely. It can be tailored more individually. I've looked at the medicine, Scully, I've crushed some of the pills and examined them, but I can't tell anything for sure. I've been waiting for you, Scully. You can tell me what they are. I've stopped taking them just in case."

"Mulder," I say, mumbling against the scratchy wool of his jacket, "you're not supposed to stop taking your medication."

"But I have to, Scully, I have to."

He shifts his weight, moves his left hand down to rest at the small of my back. Now he's swaying from side to side, just a little, the two of us dancing a small, private dance in the quiet chapel. It feels good, better than I have allowed myself to feel in weeks. It would be so easy to give into him. For once I'm the one who wants to believe, terribly and with every slow beat of my heart. I want Mulder to be right, I want the world to be the same familiar place as it always has been, as painful as that world can sometimes be. Most of all, I want to believe that I bear no responsibility for what I've done, to grasp at this easy absolution for my guilt.

_How could you have done it, Dana?_ My mother's despairing question echoes in my mind, and I still can't answer her. I don't know, I don't want to know, I can't bear to know, if the answer is what I think it is. I can't bear to think of myself as being so irrevocably broken. It would be so easy to believe otherwise--for my sake; for Mulder's sake; for the sake of holding body and soul together; for the sake of saving myself from the abyss of despair that is so perilously close. Yet would it be for the sake of the truth? I don't know that either.

Mulder stiffens before I sense that anything is wrong. He turns towards the open door, and I turn with him.

"Is everything OK in here?"

It's the chaplain, looking concerned. Usually mild-mannered, his tone has an edge to it today. I can see exactly how this must look to him.

Hastily I step away from Mulder, as far as I can given that he's still holding my wrist.

"We--I was just leaving."

I'm painfully aware that my face is still wet with tears.

"That might be a good idea." The chaplain pauses diplomatically. "Can I ask what units you're on?"

"Unit six," I answer, a guilty schoolgirl caught in a forbidden meeting. I wait for Mulder to release me. He doesn't. Nor does he answer the question.

"You're aware that I'm going to have to report this..."

"Of course, I understand that." It's difficult to carry on a mature conversation while Mulder has me by the wrist. His grip is steadily tightening, becoming almost painful. "Mulder, could you let go of me, please?"

"Please Scully, don't go, we were just..." He turns to the chaplain, raises his voice. "We were just talking, can't you see that? You can't stop us from talking. You can't be that unfeeling."

"Mulder, let go of me!"

My tone is sharper than I'd intended. Mulder drops my wrist like he's been burned, and the chaplain's eyes widen.

"I'm going back to my unit now," I say quietly, filling the shocked silence that follows with a remark that is addressed to nothing more animate than the white poinsettia on the altar. Gathering what dignity I can muster, I leave Mulder behind me.

***


	3. Chapter 3

Cars roar past only feet away, not slowing down, scattering little pieces of gravel and sand onto the pilgrims by the side of the road. It's a cold December day, bare, the sun veiled by translucent white clouds. The chill wind skirls around the edge of Mulder's trench coat, whipping it around his knees and stirring the sand into patterns on the shoulder. Behind him Scully leans into the wind, head down, following in his wake, the slipstream of his body. He turns for a moment to look back at her.

Making your way by foot along the verge of a major road in Virginia is one of the quickest ways possible to brand yourself as a loser. Mulder just hopes that it doesn't also brand you as an escapee from the local mental hospital. 

Logically he knows that it's too early for them to be missed; they are only ten minutes into their leave period and only five minutes' walk from the gate. Still, an employee from the hospital could drive by just now and the game would be up before it's even started. After that, and after the chapel incident, they'd lock him away and throw away the key. He'd never see Scully again.

So he's pushing the pace, striding along briskly. Scully trots doggedly in his wake, head down, uncomplaining. In the hospital he'd worried about her stamina. The drugs make her drowsy, slow to respond and quick to tire, and he can't help wondering how she will endure life on the run. But if she's suffering now, she's not showing it.

A car streaks past, and another. Then a very familiar white van slows to a crawl, pulling over just ahead of them. The back door slides open and John Fitzgerald Byers leans out.

"Need a lift?"

"Good work, guys," says Mulder, feeling a smile break across his face. "Right on time."

He waits for Scully to catch up, helps her into the van before getting in himself. They've got the back seats arranged like jump seats in a helicopter. Langley and Byers are sitting facing each other like commandos ready for the big operation; Frohike's at the wheel, executing a tactical and probably unnecessary U-turn as soon as the door slams shut. Scully falls into the seat next to Byers who, always the consummate gentleman, offers her a seatbelt. Mulder takes the seat next to Langley.

"This is a first for us," says Langley, who's dressed for the occasion in a Suicidal Tendencies T-shirt. "We've never sprung anyone from a mental hospital before."

"Well," says Mulder, "we couldn't have done it without our getaway drivers."

Frohike glances over his shoulder. "Where to, Agents?"

Well, this is the thing. Mulder sneaks a glance at Scully, who's sitting quietly with her eyes lowered to her folded hands. _Tired after all_. Somehow he hasn't managed to broach the subject with her yet.

"Scully," he ventures, "would you, uh, mind being the one to go to Union Station for the bag?"

"Why, where are you going?"

She fixes him with her blue eyes. He'd missed that sharp, skeptical gaze of hers. Agent Scully is back on duty. He just wishes it wasn't directed at him.

"I need to discuss some things with the Gunmen."

"Things you can't discuss in the van?"

"Yeah," he says patiently. "Things we can't discuss in the van."

Scully blows air through her narrowed lips.

"We can drop you right at Union Station on the way to Takoma Park," offers Frohike. "The train will take you straight to BWI."

She gives the proposal only a moment's consideration. "No, drop me at West Falls Church, I'll take the Metro. You'll lose too much time if you have to fight the traffic all the way into DC."

"Are you sure?" asks Mulder.

Scully blinks at him. He's not quite sure he said that himself. Here he was just on the verge of getting what he wanted, and somehow, mysteriously, he seems to have reopened the whole issue. And why? Can he actually be worried about sending Special Agent Dana Scully, MD - whom without qualms or hesitation he's dispatched into fire, flood and alien autopsies - on a Metro ride across Washington? As ridiculous as it sounds, he might be. This Scully, with her ghostly pallor, hesitant manner and still-raw scar, is not the same. She is phantasmal, easier to touch yet more distant, a Scully unknown to him whom he can only glimpse in flashes. A Scully he doesn't yet know. He doesn't want to lose sight of her for a moment longer than he has to.

"Yeah," Scully replies flatly. "I'm sure."

***

"Byers," prompts Frohike, "give it to him."

Byers hands Mulder a thick stack of bills, smiling half-apologetically.

"A little something for you and Agent Scully," Frohike explains. "We took a collection."

"Guys," says Mulder slowly, shaking his head as he flips through the money, "we can't take this." There are some crumpled ones here that look like they are out of someone's jeans pocket, but half of the bills are crisp twenties that couldn't have come from anywhere but the bank. He didn't even think that the Gunmen used a bank. Maybe they liquidated some of Byers' coin collection. "We've got our own source of funds. Besides which--"

"Besides which," says Frohike, "we didn't get Agent Scully anything for her birthday."

"We want you to have it," says Langley firmly.

And Byers chimes in: "If it'll make you feel better, you can consider it a loan."

Mulder looks up at Byers, a serious, softly-spoken, well-dressed man with a neatly trimmed beard and a sensitive demeanor. In another lifetime he could have been someone's husband, someone's father, respected, a success in life. Instead, fate has landed him with the co-editorship of a failing conspiracy magazine and two friends even more paranoid than he is. "Tell me it wasn't the coin collection..."

Byers shrugs. "We don't really have that many liquid assets."

"And he didn't pawn them," says Frohike. "He's not getting them back."

Mulder knows when he's beat. He holds up his hands. "All right, a loan. The second we're on American soil again, you're getting it back with interest."

***

Even at three on a Wednesday afternoon, BWI is thronged, its high vaulted ceilings echoing with voices. Beneath these ceilings comes the migration of whole civilizations, gypsy tribes with baggage trains and hordes of children in tow. Viewed soberly, these visions resolve themselves into the mundane world: college students going home for the holidays, suburban families getting away to the Caribbean or the Rockies, business travelers moving quiet and dark-suited between the knots of luggage. But Mulder is not feeling sober. His head buzzes with hyper-alertness sustained too long. Every noise is startling, every color vivid, from the crisp logos of airlines to the flashes of sunlight reflected from bus windshields outside. Every passerby catches his attention and none of them are the one that he wants. He is late for the rendezvous, and even so there is no sign of Scully.

He watches for her from behind a copy of the _New Yorker_ and above a cup of coffee that he doesn't really want. He sips at it anyway, burning his mouth every time. His impatience won't let him set it down to cool.

He wonders whether Scully will arrive before or after he gets dragged away. Should he shout, fight, make a scene? Getting shot isn't really one of his goals, but on balance he thinks that he should. His presence will make a mark, people will remember that he was here. It's not like he has anything left to lose. 

He wonders how the girl next to him will react. She's just walked in, duffle bag slung over her shoulder, looking aimlessly around the terminal. She's petite, slightly chunky, with dyed black hair, wearing a baseball cap and hoop earrings and a baggy University of Maryland sweatshirt. Probably yet another college student.

His mind begins to concoct a scenario, all too realistic. He begins to lose himself in it. Nothing he would welcome, but at least it's imagininable, something other than this leap into the abyss. It would be a resolution of a sort, as depressing as that might sound.

"Mulder?" says a very familiar voice at his shoulder.

He startles, spills his coffee, and then has to mop it up with inadequate paper napkins, thinking that by now the whole of the terminal will be watching.

"You shouldn't have snuck up on me like that," he tells the college girl in an undertone, still looking at the coffee stain spreading across the front of his pants.

It's Scully. Of course it's Scully. Who else could it be?

"I assumed you'd be looking out for me," she says.

He thinks it's better not to mention her powers of disguise. "How did it go?"

"Everything was where I left it." She looks up at him now, tilting her head to one side so that she can see past the bill of her cap. "How are the Gunmen?"

"They've given us a little donation. A big donation. And they wouldn't take no for an answer. It's for the honeymoon fund."

He expects her to laugh, to express surprise, to reprove him, to do anything but what she does, which is to glance up at him for a moment and then wordlessly look away again. She takes her half of the money, though.

He pursues. "I'm going to take you away from it all, Scully."

She offers him a wan, faintly apologetic smile, which is at least more than he usually gets from Scully when she doesn't feel like trading banter.

"Where are we going?" she asks, in a quiet voice, some seconds later.

He shouldn't be surprised. After all these years, just occasionally, he sometimes thinks that Scully can read his mind.

"London. England. There's a British Airways flight leaving in two hours."

Silence from under the baseball cap. He gazes down at the top of her head with an inescapable affection.

"I should have guessed," she replies, and now he can tell from her voice that she's trying hard not to smile. A twinge of relief passes through him. She nods at him - the bill of the cap dips jerkily - and goes, the little soldier marching off to the British Airways ticket counter with her military green duffle bag slung over her shoulder. He should have offered to take it for her. She would have refused.

Thirty minutes until he can buy his own ticket. Bought in cash too close together, for the same flight, they might arouse suspicion. They might arouse suspicion anyway, but he wants to make sure that Scully is safely through security before he sends up any red flags in the system. So it's back to his seat and his _New Yorker_ and his coffee, and he partly wishes that he knew how to pray even though he doesn't believe in it, and he hopes that maybe Scully is praying enough for the both of them. 

***

"Your coffee, sir," says his secretary, setting it down on his desk. "And here are the passenger manifests you asked for."

"Thanks, Kim."

Skinner settles back in his chair, leaving the coffee to cool, and starts to skim through the lists of names. All of those passengers who are flying out of Northeastern corridor airports today and paid for their tickets in cash. It's mind-numbing work and it's been done already by agents who have more free time than he does. The one constant is that none of them have any idea what they're looking for. If Agents Mulder and Scully had flown under their own names then they'd be in custody by now. Still he perseveres as his coffee loses its heat, acting on a faith that he doesn't feel.

Sometimes salvation comes through works rather than faith. The coffee is gone by the time Skinner comes across two names, side by side, that speak with a voice only he could understand.

They've bought tickets on the same flight. BA 223, departing from BWI at 5.25pm and bound for London Heathrow. Skinner checks his watch. Quarter to six.

He presses a button on his intercom. "Kim, we got anything on that APB for Mulder and Scully?"

"Nothing, sir. A couple of after-the-fact reports from the vicinity of Falls Church but the state troopers think they're not in the area anymore."

"Keep me informed."

Punching the connection closed, Skinner looks again at the passenger manifest, tapping on it with the end of his pen. Rob Petrie and Rosalind Franklin, by now in the airspace somewhere over New Jersey and heading north at six hundred miles per hour. He almost circles the names but then he thinks better of it. Instead he folds the papers in half and slides them into an inside pocket of his jacket.

Kim looks up inquiringly as he walks into the outer office.

"I'm headed home now. Tell the police that if anything comes in, I want to know about it before they do."

***

He doesn't go home. After two hours of solid beltway traffic he pulls up on a quiet suburban street in Baltimore. Slamming the car door shut, he doesn't spare a glance for the unmarked police car that's parked on the corner, keeping the house under surveillance. It's a waste of time; Scully would know better than to come here. But it's for that very reason that he's here now.

Only a few seconds after he knocks, the door opens. He can tell immediately that he is not the person who Margaret Scully hoped to find on her doorstep. One indrawn breath and she's close to tears. Her hands flutter into a knot and she wrings them together tightly, the action bringing her a modicum of control.

"Mrs. Scully. Could I speak with you for a moment?"

"Of course," she says, steadying her voice. "Come in."

When they get into the living room he expects an invitation to sit down, but instead she begins to move vaguely towards the kitchen, as if she can't quite bear to be in the same room as him. "I've got a pot of coffee on. I can get you a cup..."

He's done this sort of thing enough times to know exactly what Dana Scully's mother sees when she looks at him. Another suicide attempt, a hospital, a morgue, her one remaining daughter lying dead by the side of the road. Another request to identify a body, an autopsy, funeral arrangements and all the other messy details of death. She's holding them off as best she can, if just for the time it takes to pour a cup of coffee.

"Mrs. Scully," he says again, more sharply than he'd intended. His voice brings her around with a start. "Mrs. Scully, I'd rather get right to the reason for my visit. I have reason to believe that your daughter and Agent Mulder are on a plane headed for Europe."

"Oh. Oh my God." Margaret Scully sinks into a couch. "I thought... thought you were here to tell me..."

"No, ma'am."

She dabs at her eyes with a tissue. Skinner is still standing, unwilling to intrude further on her grief without an invitation. But she recovers her composure more quickly than he had expected and looks up at him steadily. "Tell me what you know."

When she puts it that way, what he has to tell doesn't seem like very much. Reluctantly he takes a seat, not wanting to loom over Dana Scully's diminutive mother. Not that sitting helps much.

"I thought hard about whether to come to you tonight. The information that I have - it's conjectural at best. I don't want to give you false hope. What I'm telling you now is not backed by the FBI, and it isn't to go beyond this room. But it's my personal belief that they're alive, and together."

"Together," she echoes thoughtfully. "And you know what flight they're on, where they're going?"

"I can't share that with you."

The tightening around Margaret Scully's lips is very familiar to him. He has seen a similar expression pass many times across the face of his own Agent Scully, the look of a determined woman who sees something that she wants very badly slipping slowly out of her grasp.

"But," she ventures, "you're going to find them when the plane lands? Bring them back here?"

"No," says Skinner simply. "I'm not."

Margaret Scully stares at him in disbelief.

***

Mulder paces up and down the aisle of the plane, impelled by an inner force that he's hesitant to call mania. He always paces when he's thinking. The monotonous rumble of the plane's engines is punctuated by his strides, syncopated against the steady flash of the wing lights in the blackness outside. He can feel his footfalls bending the thin metal of the passenger cabin's floor.

He paces until the stewardesses start to look at him oddly, until the lights are dimmed for the short night. After that he loiters uneasily at the front of the cabin by the toilets, slouching against an internal dividing wall whose plasticized surface draws static from the fibers of his wool sweater and makes the hairs on the back of his neck prickle in a physical simulacrum of foreboding. He bends over to peer through the small, clouded window in the emergency exit, but there's nothing to see apart from the imagined surface of the dark, chill North Atlantic, forty thousand feet below.

It has been years since he's flown without a gun resting comfortably in his shoulder holster, and he'd like to think that it's this that's making him edgy. But that isn't it, really. What pulls at him, plucking at the faintly charged and crackling wool of his sweater, forcing him to measure out the night in his footsteps, is not the lack of his firearm, nor the lengthening miles that separate him from his home, nor fear of what lies ahead. It is simply his distance from Scully

From his own assigned seat, five rows back and two seats over, he can see nothing of her, not even the top of her head. So he stands by the toilets, slouching in a slightly self-deprecating way meant to convey that he is neither a pervert nor a terrorist, and watches over Scully as she sleeps, hardly stirring.

***

I'm woken with a sudden dip and a swallow, gripped by gravity that presses me into my seat and then faithlessly releases me again. The plane is on its final approach, following a trajectory so familiar that I can feel the echoes in my bones as it banks over London. I don't need to look out the window at the streetlights and headlights strung out like tarnished gold along arterial roads. I can sense the speed-brakes coming up, feel the buffeting of the rough air around the fuselage, the rumble of aerodynamics as the massive plane glides with its engines idling, dragged back to earth only reluctantly.

I've been on final approach above a thousand cities, and I know far more about planes than I ever wanted to know, unwittingly educated by the enthusiasms of my father and two brothers. This is a Boeing 747, the workhorse of the long haul flight, but the planes that are familiar to me are far older, the planes that fought wars. As a child I sat for endless hours watching my brothers put plastic models together. I delved under the table to find the smallest pieces, pieces which without me would have been lost forever in the orange shag carpet. And when they took the sea, I took the sky. I took the P51 Mustang, and the Apollo 11 keychain, and the ghosts of flying saucers, and I never asked for any of them.

Now I pull my seat belt tight, taut across my pelvic girdle, and my hand moves vaguely in the shape of the cross. My faith has never been certain to me except as an instinct. One thing is certain: the seat belt, braced against two of the strongest bones in my body. 

The plane turns into another circle, caught in a holding pattern beyond the control of the pilot - he comes on the intercom to apologize, his voice cut with static. I swallow, my throat dry in the early morning. I'm not sure that I want us to land. I'd rather stay suspended, asleep, on hold. I can't.

***

He lies down in his clothes, but he can't sleep. After half an hour of rigid stillness he gets up in the dark, and after a moment of thought goes to sit at the little desk that's tucked into a corner, under the eaves of the B&amp;B room. There's a little shelf over the desk that is filled with paperback books, discards from some traveler's holiday, and Mulder chooses one at random, unable to see the spines. Opening the heavy drapes only a crack, he bends over the book and reads by the awkward half-light of streetlights and by the grey coming of dawn over the chimney pots of London. He reads the morning away. When Scully finally struggles awake, propping herself up on her elbows to blink at him hazily, he remembers nothing of what he's read.

"Does it ever get light here?" she asks.

"It is light. It's noon. The sun's been up for nearly four hours now."

She casts a skeptical look at the cloudy light trickling through the gap in the drapes.

"You were sleeping for England there, Scully," he adds.

Incomprehension. He could explain but thinks better of it. She's a vision of disorder, as rumpled as the loose T-shirt that she slept in. Her hair is a fly-away halo, slightly askew, dark around her pale face. She rubs her eyes and blinks at him again. "What now, Mulder?"

Her voice is still slightly blurry from sleep, but she's just as businesslike as if they were in their office discussing a case.

"Well," he starts, wrong-footed, "uh, I thought we'd start by trying to track down this friend of the Gunmen. We can't afford to stay in a B&amp;B for many nights, and they said that maybe he could offer us a place to stay."

"Right," she says, nodding. "That sounds like a plan." She sounds more certain than he does, just woken and in a country that she has never before visited. But this, Mulder realizes, is the way that Scully maps out the uncertain terrain of her life, picking her way from one marker to the next by nothing more than determination and dead reckoning.

"They said that he keeps a stall at Camden Market. It's, uh–" He pauses. He's not sure what Camden Market is, exactly, except that it's not anything that Scully is likely to have visited in her former life. "It's interesting. You'll like it."

"OK," says Scully, in that tone which suggests a weary familiarity with the sort of things that he finds interesting. That's a good thing. She won't be able to say that he didn't warn her.


End file.
